Monday, September 12, 2011

Those of you who saw the latest version of Conan the Barbarian might find the following blog post amusing. I certainly did, especially this part:

STEPHEN LANG
Time to put on my mask and unleash my godlike power!

SCREENWRITERS T.D. DONNELLY/JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER/SEAN HOOD
Wait! New rule! The mask doesn’t work without the blood of last surviving descendent of the kings who first made the mask a thousand years ago.

STEPHEN LANG
A second MacGuffin? That’s bullshit!

SCREENWRITERS T.D. DONNELLY/JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER/SEAN HOOD
Did we mention this MacGuffin is a hot babe, and you get to see her boobs?

DIRECTOR MARCUS NISPEL
I’m going to allow it.

Like all such humor, of course it's more than a little unfair, but, equally like all such humor, there's also more than a grain of truth in it. As I said previously, the real shame about the 2011 movie is that it's just not very good. Much as I'd prefer a film that hews as closely to an actual REH story as possible, I'd be willing to accept a decent pastiche, but, alas, that's not what we got. It's even more of a shame because I think, overall, the movie, for all its manifest faults, was light years closer to Howard in its portrayal of Conan than we've seen in visual media before.

Because I'm a bigger Tolkien geek than most carbon based life forms, one would think I'd be more perturbed than it am by the Glorfindel/Arwen thing. But i'm not. Like a lot of stuff in LotR, Glorfindel is hastily introduced, has a needlessly complicated backstory that would have been impossible to explain in film, and quickly disappears. If Tolkien had had a modern editor he would have gotten the axe 60 years ago. Instead we give his lines to Arwen, allowing us to feature our highly paid and popular actress for more than the window dressing Tolkien provides, as well as move the plot along to where we need to go before the movie ends up at 5 hours.

Sorry for the off topic rant...Saw Conan, been awhile since I seen anything in the genre so I was probably influenced by the satiation of my sweet tooth for s&s flix, but I had a good time.

RE: The Mask of Acheron not doing anything... giving the stor the benefit of the doubt (which really, it doesn't deserve, but hey, why not), the mask *not doing anything in combat* is actually very Howardian. The Big Mojo in Conan's day was all stuff that took a long time, concentration, stars in the right place, and really in the end, didn't much help the sorcerer at all if there was a barbarian there at that moment ready to stick a pointy thing in him.

So really, when you think about it, Conan coming in and breaking apart the ritual even after the original activation was complete, and there Zym not being able to shoot lightning and fire from the mask, was probably the *most Howardian* thing about the movie!

Besides, the power of the mask was apparently all in necromancy, the returning of the powerful dead back to (un)life. Not really much you can do with that in a combat situation on short notice... what made it such a powerful thing for the lords of Asheron... er, sorry, Acheron, was that no matter how many times you killed them, they always came back!

I'll also point out that the requirement for the blood was laid out in the OPENING NARRATION and then reiterated within the first 10 minutes of the film. I'm not sure it actually qualifies as some sort of unexpected left turn when it's there within 15 seconds of being introduced to the mask.

Follow Grognardia

Grognardia Games, Dwimmermount, the Grognardia logo, and the Dwimmermount logo are trademarks of James Maliszewski. Tékumel is a trademark of M.A.R. Barker and is used with permission of the Tékumel Foundation. For additional information, please visit www.tekumelfoundation.org